The FALCON Trial - Reducing surgical site infections in low-income and middle-income countries: a pragmatic, multicentre, stratified, randomised controlled trial is a remarkable study for many reasons. It has answered an important question about surgical site infections: whether chlorhexidine is better than betadine, and whether triclosan-impregnated sutures are better than regular sutures (spoiler alert: nope.) It's an elegant study design - a 2x2 factorial randomized controlled trial. And it's a remarkable feat: almost 6000 patients across 54 hospitals in 7 countries. And some of those hospitals don't have reliable internet or electricity. 

As you'll hear, the FALCON is just the first of a whole zoo of trials now in progress by this remarkable group.

We speak with two authors of the FALCON study, Dr. Adesoji Ademuyiwa of the University of Lagos and Mr. Dhruv Ghosh of Christian Medical College Ludhiana in India.

Image courtesy of wikimedia.org under Creative Commons license.

What is the right antibiotic plan for patients with appendicitis? Right now it seems like if you ask 10 surgeons, you're liable to get 11 answers. But Dante Yeh is doing a new, brilliantly designed study to try to get a real solution to the question. It's the Complicated And Simple Appendicitis: Restrictive or Liberal post-operative Antibiotic eXposure (CASA RELAX) study, using Desirability of Outcome Ranking (DOOR) and Response Adjusted for Duration of Antibiotic Risk (RADAR): A Randomized Controlled Trial

Dr. Yeh's study is one of three trials in the SIS multi-center study initiative. As you’ll hear, he’s looking for collaborators.

You can reach him at [email protected].

It’s ever clearer that in order to properly care for patients, to ask the right research questions, and to innovate the way medicine clearly needs to innovate, we need surgeons and researchers who reflect the communities and backgrounds that we serve.

So it was a great pleasure for to talk to Drs. Michaela West, Leo Benedict, Sabrina Sanchez, and Patricia Martinez Quinones of the SIS Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee. As always, the SIS is leading the way. 

In this inaugural episode of Bug in Your Ear, we talk with Dr. Dante Yeh. He's the guest editor of the special statistics issue of the SIS journal, Surgical Infections. We talk about how statistics can be used for good and for evil in scientific publications, common pitfalls to avoid, and some of the new statistical methods that are changing the way we conduct and read about studies.

You can find the special issue HERE.